(Turkic
Toḳuz Og̲h̲uz “the Nine Og̲h̲uz”), the name of a Turkic tribal confederation that was used in often chronologically confused Muslim accounts as the general designation of the Uyg̲h̲urs until the late 5th/11 th century. Chinese sources, in which they are first attested in 630, invariably translate rather than transcribe this name as
Chiu hsing , the “Nine Surnames”, i.e. clans or tribal groupings. The ethnonyms Uyg̲h̲ur and Toḳuz Og̲h̲uz were not, stricdy speaking, coterminous. The Uyg̲h̲urs (consisting of ten tribes or …

, also
tark̲h̲ān , a high-ranking Inner Asian title of considerable antiquity. It probably entered Arabic from Sog̲h̲dian
trg̲h̲ʾn or Middle Pers.
trk̲h̲ʾn < Turk,
tarḳan (pl. in Mongolian
tarḳat ), which appears to have been part of the imperial titulature that the Turks inherited from the Jou-jan empire. Its etymology is unclear. Attempts have been made to link it with the Hsiung-nu
Shan-yü (Archaic Chin. *
dânhwâh ), the tide of their supreme ruler (Pulleyblank, 91). It is also noted among the Hephthalites, another pre-Türk polity derivi…

(also Ṣayram, etc.), the name of a town in present-day Kazak̲h̲stan, some 7-8 miles east of Čimkent, on the Ari̊s river, a tributary of the Syr Darya. Kās̲h̲g̲h̲arī (ed. and tr. Dankoff, ii, 241; repeated in the
Taʾrīk̲h̲-i Ras̲h̲īdī , tr. Ross, 171), in the earliest reference to it under this name, identifies it as the “White City which is called Isbīd̲j̲āb” [see isfīd̲j̲āb, in Suppl.]. In Kās̲h̲g̲h̲arī’s day (i, 84) its inhabitants spoke “both Sog̲h̲dian and Turkic.” It is to be distinguished from a city of the same name in Eastern Turkistan (located betw…

, the name of a Mongolic tribal grouping. Their earliest attestation is in the 8th century Ork̲h̲on Turk inscriptions in which the
Otuz Tatar (“Thirty T.”) are noted (KT, e14, sl) together with other Proto-Mongolian peoples (the Ḳitan, Tatabi̊) as rebellious subjects of the Türk Empire. Elsewhere (BḲ, e35), the
Toḳuz Tatar (“Nine T.”) are reported as allies of the Og̲h̲uz who were defeated by Bilge Ḳag̲h̲an (Tekin,
Orhon yazitlari , see also runic fragments from Tuva and K̲h̲akasia, Vasil’ev,
Korpus , 33-4; Kljaštornyj,
Das Reich , 75) and in the late 740s b…

, Russ. Ty̲u̲men’, the name of a town, previously called Čimgi-Tura on the Tura river in Western Siberia and of a subgrouping, the
Tümenli , of the Siberian Tatars (who in 1926 numbered 22,636). The toponym derives, probably, from the Činggisid administrative-fiscal unit
tümen (< Turk.
tümen “10,000” < Tokhar. A.
tmān , B.
tmāne , an early borrowing in Mongol where it came to designate a military unit of 10,000 (Clauson,
Dictionary , 507-8; Spuler,
Goldene Horde , 303, 333, 377; Nasonov,
Mongoli̊ , 98 ff. [see tūmān 1.]). This region had been largely inhabited by Uralic peoples, in…

, the Russian rendering of Tat. Bas̲h̲k.
Tiptär , a social term and subsequently ethnonym, the “people of the register” (< Pers. < Arab,
daftar “book, record, register” ult. Gr. διφθέρα), used of a grouping speaking a Tatar dialect (influenced by Bas̲h̲kir) in Bas̲h̲ḳortostan/Bas̲h̲kiria. It denoted populations of Volga Tatar, Mis̲h̲är, Bas̲h̲kir, Čuvas̲h̲ and Volga Finnic origins which were allowed to settle on and farm Bas̲h̲kir lands after the Russian conquest of the Tatar Volga k̲h̲ānates (mid-16th century). The Finnic element, in the…

, the designation of Western Siberia first used in sources for the Čingizid era of the 13th and 14th centuries. From this the modern Russ. Сибирь (and thence “Siberia” in European and other languages) derives. The origins of this toponym are unclear. A connection with the Sabirs, a Turkic nomadic grouping which formed part of the K̲h̲azar state (cf. the Suwār in Volga Bulg̲h̲aria) and who may have occupied some parts of this region before moving to the Volga zone in the early 6th century A.D., has been suggested (Patkanov,
Über das Volk der Sabiren , 258-77).
Sabir (
Säbir …

, occasionally
Rūsiya , the Arabic rendering (and thence into other Islamic languages) of Eastern Slavic
Poycb (
Rus ’). This was the designation of a people and land from which modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus’ derive. The rapid ethnic, political and social evolution of this term and the people(s) which it denoted during the 3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries produced a series of temporally multi-layered, occasionally contradictory notices in the classical Islamic geographical literature. In contemporary Byzantine sources it appears as …

, the name of a river in Western Siberia from which
Toboli̊ḳ , the ethnonym of a subgrouping of the Siberian Tatars derives, as does also the name of the Russian city Tobol’sk built (1587) near Sibir, the capital of the Sibir Ḵh̲ānate [see sībīr ]. The Tobol Tatars, together with the
Tümenli , constitute one of the principal subgroupings of the Siberian Tatars along with the Tara, Baraba, Tomsk and Buk̲h̲arli̊ḳ groupings. The Toboli̊ḳ presently number about 50,000 and live interspersed among Russian, Siberian Buk̲h̲ārān and Ḳ…

, a nomadic people in the South Russian steppes who flourished in the early Islamic period. The K̲h̲azar tribal union emerged in the course of the 6th century A.D. in the aftermath of a series of migrations of nomadic peoples from Inner and Central Asia. With the collapse of the European Hun state in 454 A.D., some of the nomadic elements of Attila’s horde withdrew to the Pontic steppe zone. They were joined here,
ca. 463 A.D., by waves of Og̲h̲ur tribes which had been driven from Western Siberia and the Kazak̲h̲ steppe by the Sabirs who, in turn, had been forced to m…

, the name of one or more cities in Western Eurasia. The location of this city (or cities) is still unclear. It is unrecorded in the classical Islamic geographies. Maḥmūd al-Kās̲h̲g̲h̲arī (tr. R. Dankoff and J. Kelly ¶ Cambridge, Mass. 1982-5, i, 330), who finished writing his
Dīwān lug̲h̲at al-Turk in
ca. 469/1077, notes it as “a city near Bulg̲h̲ār. It is Suwār.” The latter was a tribal name (
Saviri /Σαβίροι of the Latin and Byzantine sources) of one of the constituent elements of the Volga Bulg̲h̲ārs. In this regard, Togan (
Ibn Faḍlān’s Reisebericht , 203-4, cite…

¶ I. History. 1. The pre-Islamic period: the first Turks in history and their languages. Towards 540, on the northern fringes of China, the nomadic empire of the Z̲h̲ouan-z̲h̲ouan (proto-Mongols?) dominated the lands of Mongolia and some neighbouring zones. Its Ḳag̲h̲an or ruler had as his vassals notably the chiefs of two important tribal confederations, those of the Türks, in the northern Altai, and the equally Turkish-speaking one of the “High Waggons” (Chinese Kao-kiu) in the Selenga basin (the northern part of central Mongolia). After an abortive revolt by these last, the …